Third Hand

The starting point for Vlatka Horvat’s performance Third Hand is a collection of scenes, images, and performance moments that other artists and writers have recounted to her from memory. Responding to this unruly catalogue of vivid fragments, and combining them with her own memories of different performances, Horvat creates a work that is somewhere between collage, an animated archive, and a kaleidoscopic memory palace. Third Hand explores the ways in which performance lingers despite the processes of distortion, displacement, and erasure which take place in memory and over time, and which are amplified through the act of narration. The human body summoned in Third Hand is a problematic, transforming, and misremembered one – mistaken for animal, ghost, object, or machine; hesitant and determined, exhausted and persisting, ecstatic, working, resting, and playing as it is made and remade in language and in the moment of performance.

Project Background

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, as part of City of Chicago’s Year of Theater program for 2019, has organized an exhibition focused around the archive of goat island, a Chicago-based performance company, which has – over the course of its 23-year lifespan (1986 – 2009) and after – influenced generations of artists and performance makers, both in Chicago and internationally.

Titled …we have discovered the performance by making it, the exhibition – on view in spring and summer 2019 – presented materials from the company’s archive alongside new works by nine artists who were commissioned to develop new projects in a dialogue with the nine performance works of goat island. As one of the invited artists, I was asked to make a work that starts with an encounter with the goat island’s piece It’s an Earthquake in my Heart, which I saw when it was first presented as a work-in-progress in Chicago in 1999. The construction of memory – investigated through enactments of an unnamed disaster and through the repetitive re-playing of its aftermath – was at the heart of goat island’s piece. Accepting the invitation to make a work in response to it, I have decided not to watch the video documentation of their 1999-2001 performance, but to make a work by summoning fragments, images, and moments of multiple performances that linger in the bodies and memories of other people. Deferring the act of remembering to others in this way, my response to It’s an Earthquake in my Heart was to echo this absent object by placing its fragments in dialogue with those taken from other absent objects.

The contributors to the project, who have written their recounted memories in response to a series of prompts I have given them, are all performance and dance makers, theorists and writers on and around performance.

--

Commissioned by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) as part of the exhibition "goat island archive - we have discovered the performance by making it".

Research and development supported by a residency at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago.

• Author
• Organisation
• Organisation
• Organisation